Organization development

Organization development is the process through which an organization develops the internal capacity to most efficiently and effectively provide its mission work and to sustain itself over the long term. This definition highlights the explicit connection between organizational development work and the achievement of organizational mission. This connection is the rationale for doing OD work. Organization development, according to Richard Beckhard, is defined as: a planned effort, organization-wide, managed from the top, to increase organization effectiveness and health, through planned interventions in the organization's 'processes', using behavioural science knowledge.

According to Warren Bennis, organization development (OD) is a complex strategy intended to change the beliefs, attitudes, values, and structure of organizations so that they can better adapt to new technologies, markets, and challenges.

Warner Burke emphasizes that OD is not just "anything done to better an organization"; it is a particular kind of change process designed to bring about a particular kind of end result. OD involves organizational reflection, system improvement, planning, and self-analysis.

The term "Organization Development" is often used interchangeably with Organizational effectiveness, especially when used as the name of a department or a part of the Human Resources function within an organization.

Organization Development is a growing field that is responsive to many new approached including Positive Adult Development.

Definition

At the core of OD is the concept of an organization, defined as two or more people working together toward one or more shared goals. Development in this context is the notion that an organization may become more effective over time at achieving its goals.

"OD is a long range effort to improve organization's problem solving and renewal processes, particularly through more effective and collaborative management of organization culture-with specific emphasis on the culture of formal workteams-with the assistance of a change agent or catalyst and the use of the theory and technology of applied behavioral science including action research"

History

Early development

Kurt Lewin played a key role in the evolution of organization development as it is known today. As early as World War II, Lewin experimented with a collaborative change process (involving himself as consultant and a client group) based on a three-step process of planning, taking action, and measuring results. This was the forerunner of action research, an important element of OD, which will be disucssed later. Lewin then participated in the beginnings of laboratory training, or T-groups, and, after his death in 1947, his close associates helped to develop survey-research methods at the University of Michigan. These procedures became important parts of OD as developments in this field continued at the National Training Laboratories and in growing numbers of universities and private consulting firms across the country.

The failure of off-site laboratory training to live up to its early promise was one of the important forces stimulating the development of OD. Laboratory training is learning from a person's "here and now" experience as a member of an ongoing training group. Such groups usually meet without a specific agenda. Their purpose is for the members to learn about themselves from their spontaneous "here and now" responses to an ambiguous hypothetical situation. Problems of leadership, structure, status, communication, and self-serving behavior typically arise in such a group. The members have an opportunity to learn something about themselves and to practice such skills as listening, observing others, and functioning as effective group members.

As formerly practiced (and occasionally still practiced for special purposes), laboratory training was conducted in "stranger groups," or groups composed of individuals from different organizations, situations, and backgrounds.A major difficulty developed, however, in transferring knowledge gained from these "stranger labs" to the actual situation "back home". This required a transfer between two different cultures, the relatively safe and protected environment of the T-group (or training group) and the give-and-take of the organizational environment with its traditional values. This led the early pioneers in this type of learning to begin to apply it to "family groups" — that is, groups located within an organization. From this shift in the locale of the training site and the realization that culture was an important factor in influencing group members (along with some other developments in the behavioral sciences) emerged the concept of organization development.

Case history

The Cambridge Clinic found itself having difficulty with its internal working relationships. The medical director, concerned with the effect these problems could have on patient care, contacted an organizational consultant at a local university and asked him for help. A preliminary discussion among the director, the clinic administrator, and the consultant seemed to point to problems in leadership, conflict resolution, and decision processes. The consultant suggested that data be gathered so that a working diagnosis could be made. The clinic officials agreed, and tentative working arrangements were concluded.

The consultant held a series of interviews involving all members of the clinic staff, the medical director, and the administrator. Then the consultant "thematized", or summarized, the interview data to identify specific problem areas. At the beginning of a work¬shop about a week later, the consultant fed back to the clinic staff the data he had collected.

The staff arranged the problems in the following priorities:

1. Role conflicts between certain members of the medical staff were creating tensions that interfered with the necessity for cooperation in handling patients.
2. The leadership style of the medical director resulted in his putting off decisions on important operating matters. This led to confusion and sometimes to inaction on the part of the medical and administrative staffs.
3. Communication between the administrative, medical, and outreach (social worker) staffs on mutual problems tended to be avoided. Open conflicts over policies and procedures were thus held in check, but suppressed feelings clearly had a negative influence on interpersonal and intergroup behavior.

Through the use of role analysis and other techniques suggested by the consultant, the clinic staff and the medical director were able to explore the role conflict and leadership problems and to devise effective ways of coping with them. Exercises designed to improve communication skills and a workshop session on dealing with conflict led to progress in developing more openness and trust throughout the clinic. An important result of this first workshop was the creation of an action plan that set forth specific steps to be applied to clinic problems by clinic personnel during the ensuing period. The consultant agreed to monitor these efforts and to assist in any way he could. Additional discussions and team development sessions were held with the director and the medical and administrative staffs.

A second workshop attended by the entire clinic staff took place about two months after the first. At the second workshop, the clinic staff continued to work together on the problems of dealing with conflict and interpersonal communication. During the last half-day of the meeting, the staff developed a revised action plan covering improvement activities to be undertaken in the following weeks and months to improve the working relationships of the clinic.

A notable additional benefit of this OD program was that the clinic staff learned new ways of monitoring the clinic's performance as an organization and of coping with some of its other problems. Six months later, when the consultant did a follow-up check on the organization, the staff confirmed that interpersonal problems were now under better control and that some of the techniques learned at the two workshops associated with the OD programs were still being used.

Modern development

In recent years, serious questioning has emerged about the relevance of OD to managing change in modern organizations. The need for "reinventing" the field has become a topic that even some of its "founding fathers" are discussing critically.

Important figures

• Chris Argyris
• Richard Beckhard
• Kenneth Benne
• Robert R. Blake
• Leland Bradford
• W. Warner Burke
• Tom Cummings
• Fred Emery
• Charles Handy
• Elliott Jaques
• Kurt Lewin (1898 - 1947) is widely recognized as the founding father of OD, although he died before the concept became current in the mid-1950s. From Lewin came the ideas of group dynamics, and action research which underpin the basic OD process as well as providing its collaborative consultant/client ethos. Institutionally, Lewin founded the Research Center for Group Dynamics at MIT, which moved to Michigan after his death. RCGD colleagues were among those who founded the National Training Laboratories (NTL), from which the T-group and group-based OD emerged. In the UK, working as close as was possible with Lewin and his colleagues, the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations was important in developing systems theories. Important too was the joint TIHR journal Human Relations, although nowadays the Journal of Applied Behavioral Sciences is seen as the leading OD journal.
• Rensis Likert
• Gordon Lippitt
• Ronald Lippitt
• Jane Mouton
• William J. Rothwell
• Edgar Schein
• Donald Schon
• Peter Senge
• Eric Trist
• Saul Eisen

See also

OD topics

• Action research
• Appreciative inquiry
• Chaos theory in organizational development
• Collaboration
• Collaborative method
• Employee research
• Executive development
• Group process & Group development
• Knowledge Management
• Leadership development
• Managing change
• Organizational communication
• Organizational culture
• Organizational engineering
• Organizational learning
• Organizational performance
• Performance improvement
• Positive Adult Development
• Process improvement
• Quality
• Social network
• Strategic planning
• Succession planning
• Systems intelligence
• Systems thinking
• Team building
• T-groups
• Value network
• Workplace democracy
• Workplace spirituality
• Workforce planning

Milestones

• Appreciative inquiry
• Hawthorne effect
• Human Relations Movement

OD in context

• Change management
• Coaching
• Facilitation
• Human resources
• Industrial and organizational psychology
• Training and development